Southern Sources

Presented at Southern Sources: A Symposium Celebrating Seventy-Five Years of the Southern Historical Collection, 18-19 March 2005, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Dreams to Remember:" Memory, Dreams, and the South since 1954 Waldo E. Martin University of California, Berkeley 19 March 2005 I’ve got dreams, dreams to remember . .—Otis Redding[1] [W]e must tap the well of our own collective imaginations . do what earlier generations have done: dream.—Robin D. G. Kelley[2] Historical dreams are our collective hopes and aspirations. Historical memories are what become of those dreams when filtered through the mesh of how we choose to represent reality. By looking at dreams and memories rooted in but not confined to the post-1954 South, I want to argue that historical dreams and historical memories are inextricably bound: dynamically interwoven and mutually constitutive. As a result, these memories and dreams are important to the researching and writing of all history, including southern history. One of the key tasks of world-class archival repositories like the Southern Historical Collection, then, must continue to be to serve as a home for the dreams as well as the memories of the South in particular, as a window onto the region, indeed the nation and the world. The vision of the Southern Historical Collection for the twenty-first century must be to continue to build the collection from a sensibility rooted in the South but opening out to not just the region, but also the nation and the world. The vision must be an expansive localism that embraces cosmopolitanism as against provincialism. In this way, the collection can further enhance its status as a world-class collection and will be able to contribute even more fully to cutting edge scholarly and public history work as well as the growing globalization of knowledge. Historical dreams and memories, then, reflect an integral engagement with material reality—conscious as well as unconscious attempts to shape that reality. These dreams and memories also provide windows onto ways in which individuals and groups understand and represent reality, the past, and even history. Rather than focusing on dreams as ephemera or the terrain of the subconscious or unconscious mind, the historical dreams recounted here reveal a dialectic, or put another way, a negotiation, between the world of hope, aspiration, and possibility—on one hand—and the world of agency and 1 constraint—on the other. While to some extent reflective of symbol and myth, these dreams are also reflective of lived experience, life lessons, and quotidian struggle. Following this line of thinking, archives are in a profound sense not just places to store and subsequently to view documents, but they are also the treasured repositories of dreams and memories. This vision of both the documentary sensibility and the documentary project thus sees both as cut from the same cloth. Both the documents themselves and the dreams and memories that they reveal are in fact essential raw materials for the writing of history. They are both vital to unlocking and to fathoming historical imagination as well as economic, political, social, cultural, even moral experience. Seen another way, historical dreams and memories are explanatory devices: ways to make sense of worlds old and new, past and present, and worlds being imagined. Section one is an examination of the visual and spatial geography of late Jim Crow (the 1950s and 1960s) in Greensboro, N.C.: its moorings, meanings, and legacy. The focus is how a group of black folk envisioned and traversed the space and place of Jim Crow. Here the archival challenge is to consider the extent to which collections like the Southern document and thus both help us to map and understand that lost world. The specifics of the discussion are even narrower: an analysis of an ongoing battle about what to do with the original building of the historic high school for local blacks and what that battle tells us about the dreams and memories of a representative group of black southerners. Section two is a discussion of the changing composition and character of Little Hayti—a historic African American community in Durham, N.C.—as revealed in the shifting landscape of its central thoroughfare: Fayetteville Street. The focus is the meanings and implications of the growing Latino migration to North Carolina in general and Durham in particular for relations between African Americans and Latinos, emphasizing African American perspectives. This extraordinary Latino migration and settlement not only speaks deeply to the enduring power of historical dreams and memories, but also how this area has become a site for the realization of those dreams and the creation of new memories. It is absolutely imperative that institutions like the Southern document this kind of transformative historical moment. I In May 2000, the Guilford County Board of Education approved a plan to raze James B. Dudley High School and to replace it with a wholly new 31.4 million dollar state-of-the art facility. That same decision included 12.2 million for the renovation of George A. Grimsley High School. Looking toward future needs, voters had already approved a two hundred million dollar bond to finance these and other much- need projects and improvements. On the face of it, this might have appeared to be a progressive and popular decision. Dudley, the historic high school for African Americans, had been founded in 1928 and opened its doors to its first class in 1929. Up until 1971, when school integration came to Greensboro under the shadow of federal mandates, Dudley had been the high school that the vast majority of black Greensboro youth had attended. Those forty-two years had coincided with the steady growth of black Greensboro and its emergence as a vibrant and influential community. Those years also coincided with the increasing assertiveness of African Americans locally and nationally regarding their civil, political, and economic rights. The momentum of that assertiveness gathered steam and in time constituted itself in a formal Civil rights Movement that took root in Depression-era struggles, and especially in World War II struggles. By the 1950s, that strengthening momentum yielded the southern grassroots insurgency that led to key moments like the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956). 2 For Greensboro blacks in particular, the fact that the local black student-led sit-in at the F. W. Woolworth’s by four North Carolina A&T State University students in early February 1960 sparked the subsequent national student sit-in movement of the 1960s has remained a defining mark of black community history and equally deep local pride. The additional fact that three of the four original protestors—Ezell Blair, Jr., David Richmond, and Franklin McCain—were freshmen who had just graduated from Dudley that spring further enhanced the sense of pride in and relationship to this critical historical moment. Indeed that singular act of protest helped unleash a dynamic wave of student protest energies that washed over the nation, leading to the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee a little over two months later. Seen another way, that pioneering sit-in jumpstarted the national Civil Rights Movement. The history of Dudley High, especially in its initial forty-two years, has been inextricably bound with the local Civil Rights Movement. A crucial element of this ongoing freedom struggle was its multi-front offensive against legal and customary Jim Crow. Both the sit-in campaign and the school desegregation campaign waged in the wake of the 1954 Brown decision were central elements of that struggle. After 1971 the local public schools experienced a period of significant integration. Today, however, in the wake of that very brief moment of integration, Dudley High has once again become a high school that principally serves local blacks. The current generation of black students who attend Dudley do so as part of a school system that has nominally achieved desegregation, even though a number of its schools, like Dudley, are fundamentally black. The trend toward both re-segregation and islands of all-black or all-minority schools amidst allegedly desegregated systems is a fact of life in early twentieth-first century America. A central part of the particular dilemma in trying to remake Dudley into an integrated school has been its deep and enduring legacy as the city’s historically black high school. Seventy-five years after its founding, during the post-Jim Crow and post-Civil Rights eras as well as the Jim Crow era, thus for most of its institutional history, Dudley has been pre-eminently the black high school. Neither the Civil rights-Black Power and post-Civil Rights-Black Power movements nor the uneven local efforts at school integration have materially altered the perception and representation of Dudley as a black school. Perhaps it was to be expected, then, that the board of education’s decision to demolish the old school building would ignite controversy. To allay the likelihood of such controversy, the board had chosen Harvey Gant, one of the most well-known and highly esteemed blacks in North Carolina—a renowned architect, former Charlotte mayor, and influential Democratic Party politician, to draw up the plans for the brand new Dudley. When Gant announced that renovating the old building would be prohibitively expensive and that building a totally new Dudley was the more feasible financial option, the fate of the original building appeared sealed. Not quite so fast. A growing number of Dudley boosters, mostly former Dudleyites from the pre-1971 period, when the school built a solid reputation as a vital and striving institution that achieved much against the considerable odds of Jim Crow racism, created the Committee to Save Dudley.

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